WordPress: Error Uploading Media Files

I recently got the following error while uploading media to my wordpress site:

Unable to create directory uploads/2016/06. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

Here are the steps to fix the issue:

  • Possible Issue 1: Incorrect Directory pointed to in the settings:
    • Open your WordPress Admin page (this is usually at /wp-admin)
    • Hover over the sidebar menu “Settings” and then click on “Media
    • Check the section “Uploading Files“(If this section is missing then try the next solution)
    • check the value for “Store Uploads in This Folder
    • Most commonly the value should be “wp-content/uploads“, if not is should be pointing to the correct folder on the server. My setup had it pointing to the wrong directory with the wrong permissions.
  • Possible Issue 2: Wrong permissions
    • Login to your server via ssh or ftp
    • Traverse to the installation folder of the WordPress site
    • Check and see if the user:group settings are correct (Usually for UNIX systems its www-data:www-data)
    • If that is fine look at the permissions for the ‘uploads‘ directory and its sub directories
    • running a command ‘ls -l uploads‘, will give you the permissions set
    • The ideal permission is of 755. For this run the command “chmod -r 755 uploads

Hopefully that will solve your problems.